


the sensible side of love

by fillory



Category: I Am In Eskew (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Domesticity, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, Queerplatonic Relationships, the horrors of canon can't stop me from giving these two a happy ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-08
Updated: 2019-07-08
Packaged: 2020-06-24 19:42:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19730488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fillory/pseuds/fillory
Summary: After finally escaping Eskew, David and Riyo build a softer life together.





	the sensible side of love

After Eskew, David and Riyo build a house.

 _Windows for walls,_ David tells her when she asks him what he wants, as they leave Eskew in cinders a kilometre behind them. The smoke that reaches them on the warm, sooty breeze tastes clean, and David is certain now that the city has been excised from his lungs. _I want a house with windows for walls._

Riyo looks at him for a moment, then pronounces: _You’ll need something to keep the heat in, David._

It isn’t censure. Her next words are an offer to help him make it work.

The two of them find a plot of land in South Wales, close enough to Cardiff for Riyo to find work as an investigator should she decide to return to her profession. For the moment, she says, it’s time for a break. She needs to decide if finding missing people is still her calling, now that she’s been one of them.

The land they buy with the remnants of Riyo’s and David’s mother’s savings is wild, overgrown with weeds and wildflowers. The trees that line the nearby creek hang dourly down towards the water as if they’ve decided that holding their crowns up is too much work for them to do today, thank you; check back in tomorrow and they’ll give you the same answer. David can relate.

( _They’re willows,_ Riyo says when he tells her, and laughs in his face. A butterfly has landed in the cloud of her hair. There’s pollen on her nose. David can’t help but smile back, his first true grin in years.)

She listens patiently to his stammered explanation of why he wants so many windows, and nods when he finally lands on the word _paranoia_.

 _I want to see what’s coming for me,_ he says, and she tells him, _Anything coming for you will meet the business end of my rifle first. But we can build whatever you need._

 _What if we make it all out of windows?_ she asks, squinting into the sunlight with her hands raised in front of her like a movie director framing a shot. _The whole cottage? With the right caulking, double glazing, and weatherstripping, we can do a lot to insulate it, and maybe by winter you’ll feel better about having walls._

 _Maybe,_ David replies, dubious.

Luckily they’re on the cusp of summer, and working together with help hired from the nearby town, they finish their home by late June. It’s a motley, odd-looking thing: mismatched windows cobbled together from sundry hardware and charity shops, their frames hammered together and insulated to create a lopsided, squarish cottage, with warm hardwood floors set on a platform just above the meadow’s tall grass. Riyo hangs curtains to cover each side for privacy, but ties all except for the ones around her bedroom back against the corners of the house to keep the views clear and open for him.

Once they’re done, David stands in the very centre of their kitchen and marvels: He can see all around him, the entire world, for acres without leaving his home.

It’s perfect.

The two of them settle into a routine quickly enough. Riyo sets up broadband and enrols herself in several online courses to keep her mind sharp; she spends long afternoons sat in their loveseat reading biology texts and Russian novels until the last gloaming lights have faded each evening. David has a harder time of it to begin with, but finally finds something to do in keeping their house neat and dusted and insect-free. He buys an ancient typewriter at an antique shop and pecks out snatches of poetry as they come to him, and at night, he takes up crochet to keep his hands busy as he gazes up at the stars outside their walls.

Sometimes, he and Riyo curl up together on their dawn-facing sofa with her laptop balanced between them and laugh at what passes for horror films nowadays. Other times, David spends hours staring unblinkingly into the distance, trying to catch the dark spires of Eskew before it can sneak up on him and take him back.

Riyo lets him be, those days, and works around him, bringing him glasses of water and dinner without a word. In return, he wakes her from the night terrors she still has sometimes, months after burning Eskew to the ground.

They go on long walks through sunlit fields and talk about countless insignificant things: what they need to buy from the supermarket; their pasts and dreams; whether or not the frogs in the creek will ever submit to being caught, or if they’re going to keep hopping up into David’s hair every time he tries. Eventually, Riyo shows him the love letters she still writes to a partner that will never come home. _He was brilliant,_ she says. _He was part of me._ And David thinks for a moment of Allegra, and then shakes his head to clear away the memories, and shares stories about his few, awkward childhood friends instead. He’s remembering details from a life that Eskew had made him think he’d forgotten years ago.

 _This isn’t romantic,_ Riyo tells him one day, apropos of nothing, turning to hold him in her steady, dark-eyed gaze.

 _Oh,_ David says, and then, _Oh! Of course. I didn’t think—_

 _Me neither,_ says Riyo. _I just wanted to check in._ And then she goes back to her novel.

It’s not romance, what they have. She’s right. It’s something simultaneously deeper and less complex than that: David trusts her with his life, and knows that she would kill for him in return—but not once has he considered trying to kiss her. They live in each other’s pockets; he braids her hair back when she wants it out of her face, and she works the knots out of his shoulders when he finally lets them down from beside his ears. They’re already planning to re-insulate their cottage and prepare their vegetable garden for the winter. They’re intimate in all the ways that matter to them.

It would be strange, David decides. Strange to interrupt the peace they’ve built together; stranger still to try to make something different out of a thing already complete and wholly wondrous.

He’s never been used to having friends, but he thinks he’s finally getting the hang of it.

**Author's Note:**

>  _And maintenance is the sensible side of love,_  
>  _Which knows what time and weather are doing_  
>  _To my brickwork; insulates my faulty wiring;_  
>  _Laughs at my dryrotten jokes; remembers_  
>  _My need for gloss and grouting; which keeps_  
>  _My suspect edifice upright in air,_  
>  _As Atlas did the sky._
> 
> U. A. Fanthorpe, from “Atlas,” _Safe as Houses_


End file.
